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This episode was kind of a disappointment, it was nothing like I have imagined. Instead of a good fighting scene --or at least a good usage of kirito's dual blade, all we got was a simple thrust with rocket launching effect from Kirito. Meh. Well on the bright side, I pretty much enjoyed Recon's screen time and the entry of the Dragons.

EDIT: Where the hell did the super anxious and desperate Kirito went to!?

Count me on the plus side. Good human interaction. Good relationship between the siblings. Can't solve the whole problem in a few minutes, but can find a way to go on and be close. I'm far from a connoisseur of fighting, but that aspect was enjoyable enough for me. Even the fairies ex machina.

At least, Suguha's issue wasn't magically solved, albeit it was still on the easy side (well, to have Suguha jumping back in ALO that quickly is quite too early but well).

That said, color me underwhelmed by the fight in there: it is quite obvious the guardians weren't exactly that strong but have a sheer domination through numbers, which indeed makes the advent quite difficult.
However, the execution and presentation were quite poor: the fight looks extremely turn based, with a knack of abusing close pan to the point you don't exactly see a single fight, but a sequence of several ones.
To make things a bit worse, the animation director seemed to be a tad conflicted, considering the perspective of the room is quite flawed: more often than not, the sylphes and dragon riders are attacking, with the background being "vertical", so they are still on an horizontal plan... but wasn't the goal tobreak through the mass of guardians in order to get into the inner door?
And surely, repeating the same animation stocks don't help in the aspect of "massive rampart of enemies before you" feeling: sure you see a lot of guardians in the backgrounds, and a literal swarm before the inner door, but the amount of attacking guardians on screen hardly looked impressive.

Really, the setup, the mood really was going very well for a epic raid clash, which compliments the aspect of "world wide event". However, the presentation of said fight was a bit on the lackluster side, and they still had the "good" idea of having a showcase of Leefa and Sakuya's... assets.
Kirito charging this way makes you wonder why indeed he didn't bother with another weapon before...

And I'm quite surprised that aggro wasn't even a known concept in ALO except for this dungeon. Might give even more "too easy" vibes for Kazuto

I expected the big fight to be a bit ..bigger. I just didn't feel like there was enough monsters attacking. They kept showing there was a lot but all they did was stand there in the background filling up space. It's always just a handful attacking. I also imagined that there would've been more dragon knights and Slyph forces. The final fight scene felt more anticlimatic to me compared to the last couple episodes.

The novel eloquently drew an image of massive whiteness against almost a single black dot (Kirito). Also his attack to break through was alot more spectacular in the novel as it wasn't some cheap move where he puts both blades on top of each other and just plow through everything. He was using dual blades in super speed cutting thru the whole blank of white mobs like a boss. It shows me that there didn't seem to be a whole lot of budget left for this episode.

And I'm quite surprised that aggro wasn't even a known concept in ALO except for this dungeon. Might give even more "too easy" vibes for Kazuto

Nah, aggro was a known concept. Aggroing all the monsters in their path is exactly what Kirito did when they were dashing out of the dungeon a few episodes ago. It's just that outside the dome, either healing doesn't draw aggro, or it doesn't do so nearly so easily.